Published 12:00 am, Sunday, March 26, 2006

On Saturday,
George Mason
senior
Lamar Butler
fired back at Anderson with a special team slogan coined for the Elite Eight: "They don't know what's coming."

Let the war of words begin.

The two teams will settle their differences today at 2:40 p.m. when No. 1 seed UConn (30-3) battles No. 11 seed George Mason (26-7) at the
Verizon Center
. The winner will advance to the Final Four next weekend in Indianapolis. George Mason senior
Jai Lewis
, meanwhile, took a more diplomatic approach to Anderson's brazen prediction.

"I don't think it'll be a guarantee," said Lewis, a 6-foot-7, 275-pound forward. "It will probably be a good game, but it won't be as easy as he thinks it is.

"It's definitely going to be a fight," Lewis continued. "This is definitely more motivation. As we get more hate and stuff like that, we just use it as motivation."

Familiar faces:
Pat Sellers
, the director of basketball operations for UConn, is no stranger to Lewis, an army tank in sneakers. In fact, Sellers recruited Lewis a few years ago when he was an assistant to
Howie Dickenman
at Central Connecticut State in New Britain.

"He was a really good player in high school. Everybody in the Northeast Conference was recruiting him hard," Sellers said. "But then, he went to prep school at (
Maine Central Institute
) and got a lot better. He lost a lot of weight and really developed and George Mason came in and got him.

"He's a good player. He has a great feel for the game," Sellers added. "He plays like a 30-year-old man. He has good hands and a big body and he knows what to do with the ball."

Going into today's Elite Eight matchup, Lewis was averaging almost 14.0 points and 8.0 rebounds this season. Overall, Lewis is only the second player in George Mason history to compile 1,400 points, 850 rebounds, 100 assists and 100 steals.

Flashback time: Although George Mason coach
Jim Larranaga
and UConn coach Jim Calhoun have known each other for 25 years, today's Elite Eight game will be just the third time they have played each other.

"When I first got the job, I called Jim and asked him if he wanted to play," Larranaga recalled. "He said, 'Sure, we'll play you at Northeastern.'

"So, I said, 'C'mon, Jim. You're an AIC graduate. You're an alumnus. You have to come back and play at your alma mater. We stink. You're great. Come on, play us.' Well, I think that appealed to his ego and he said, 'Yeah, you're right. OK. We'll play home-and-home.'"

For Larranaga, a first-time head coach, it was the equivalent of a scheduling coup.

"So, we went to Northeastern that first year and we lost in a pretty good game. We lost by 10 or 12," Larranaga said. "The next year, they came to our place. They were having a great year and we had an unbelievable game.

"We trailed by six with a minute to go, but we scored the last seven points of the game and won by one," Larranaga said. "I liked that ending a lot better."